CreateDigitalMusic.com recently posted this video. Though the focus is on Live Coding, what jumped out was this comment on the syntax of Lisp:

“Rule number 1. Everything is a list. Rule number 2. Some lists are functions in which the first item of the list is a function name and the remaining items are parameters. You have now learned the entire syntax of Lisp.”

This is a bit of a revelation to me. Too be honest, I’ve sort of avoided lisp for the most superficial of reasons; There are just to many parenthesis.

And now that my mind is open again, I’m going to take a serious look into Lisp and especially Impromptu. I’m not saying that I’m shifting from a Python-based environment to a Lisp-based system, only that I will continue to remain open to other possibilities.

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Jake, make sure to check out Clojure, it’s a very nice looking Lisp that runs in the JVM. This is the variant that has gotten closest to convincing me to learn a Lisp dialect (if I had the time to spend on that sort of thing).